For the next several years, in the sweltering heat of August, cars would descend from Midtown Manhattan, depositing industry big shots outside the festival’s sometimes scruffy downtown stages, where they would be allowed to skip the lines to scout for a smash.

“There was this point in our history where we really could’ve turned into just an inexpensive backers’ audition — just only Broadway-bound musicals with commercial ambitions,” Ms. Holy, the festival’s producing artistic director, said recently at FringeCentral, the festival’s pop-up headquarters at a former karaoke bar on Second Avenue.

The festival, known informally as FringeNYC, chose not to take that path. This year’s version, which opened on Friday and runs through Aug. 25, encompasses a diverse mix of 185 shows, mostly theater but also dance and other performing arts, at spaces scattered across Greenwich Village and the Lower East Side.

Yet the festival, founded in 1997 and produced by the Present Company, has always had a strong hand in shaping its own lineup. Rejecting the free-for-all spirit of many fringe festivals, it fields about 850 applications a year and has always winnowed them by jury.

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Postcards advertising shows included in this year's FringeNYC Festival.Credit
Karsten Moran for The New York Times

On the fringe world’s spectrum, that’s a somewhat controversial choice. Some festivals pick their artists by lottery or first come first served. Frigid New York, a smaller Manhattan fringe that takes place in winter, uses both approaches to allocate its 30 slots. At the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, anyone with a show and a place to present it can join the program.

To Christina Augello, artistic director of Exit Theater in San Francisco, which was a founder of Frigid New York and produces the San Francisco Fringe Festival, the use of juries is a black-and-white issue. By her definition — and that of the Canadian Association of Fringe Festivals, which has members in Canada and the United States — FringeNYC and other adjudicated festivals simply do not qualify as fringes.

“The fringe is a noncurated festival by origin, and so anything else that curates or has a jury is not a fringe,” she said.

But Ms. Holy argues that as the nation’s “theater mecca,” New York is unlike other cities. FringeNYC, whose prominent alumni include Kristen Schaal and Bradley Cooper and shows like “Silence! The Musical,” “Dog Sees God,” and “Matt & Ben,” offers a commodity that’s precious even in August: a stage in Manhattan, Ms. Holy points out.

Allowing submissions by first come first served “would mean a line around the block,” she said. “It would be hard to imagine that that wouldn’t be all agent submissions. Because who has the money to hire somebody to be at our office the first morning at 4 a.m.? It’s not the person who’s waiting tables until 4 a.m.”

Fred Backus, an actor and musician in his 11th year as an adjudicator for FringeNYC, said that a fringe festival in New York needs to be juried. “Otherwise, it’s basically who’s got the best marketing and who’s got the most money wins the day,” he said. “And that we have in New York already, every day of the year.”

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Elena K. Holy, FringeNYC's producing artistic director.Credit
Karsten Moran for The New York Times

As it is, deep-pocketed hopefuls who miss the February application deadline sometimes dangle large donations in the hope that the festival will overlook their tardiness. Ms. Holy also gets unsolicited calls from agents who announce, as the festival approaches, that their well-known clients suddenly have openings in their schedules. Neither approach is going to win her favor, she said. But prominent artists do also apply to the festival the conventional way.

“A lot of people think we adjudicate to find the next ‘Urinetown,’ ” said Ms. Holy, who estimated that FringeNYC had received about $5,000 in royalties from that show over the years. “One of the reasons that we chose to adjudicate is so that we can quietly and confidentially decline someone who doesn’t need this opportunity. There are a lot of recognizable names that have come across my desk, and it’s certainly not that the work wasn’t good, but if you have opportunity elsewhere, then you probably don’t need one of our slots.”

Mitch Kess, a composer and Central Park carriage driver, won a slot this year for his show “Horse Play The Musical” after it failed to make the cut last year. No explanation is provided for a rejection, but Mr. Kess responded to his by reworking the musical’s book with a fellow carriage driver, Ariel Fintzi, who came up with its current plot: a love story between a carriage driver and an activist who wants horses banned from the park.

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The presentation was more polished this year, too: instead of a CD of songs he sang himself, Mr. Kess submitted a CD featuring hired singers and recorded by the show’s music director, Ted Cruz.

“We know how hard it is to get in,” Mr. Kess said one recent afternoon at Grand Army Plaza, where he was standing with Pickles, a tawny Belgian horse. “There’s a lot of cachet, and it’s a big deal.”

Around 70 to 80 FringeNYC jurors are recruited each year; this year’s range in age from their teens to their 70s, and in experience from scientist to Broadway house manager. Some have been festival participants or interns. Others came to Ms. Holy’s attention by referral. They undertake a complex and time-intensive process of reading, ranking and reporting back to a panel that makes the final decisions.

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Mitch Kess, a carriage driver whose "Horse Play the Musical" is in the festival this year.Credit
Karsten Moran for The New York Times

In assembling the festival, Ms. Holy said, quality is just one consideration. Diversity is also important: it means not only trying to get a mix of ages, experience, geography and points of view, but also making sure that if the same legally troubled celebrity inspires several shows — as happened with Martha Stewart a while back — only one gets in. The need to achieve that balance, Ms. Holy said, is why a lottery system would be wrong for FringeNYC.

Two years ago, in an effort to help with 50/50 in 2020, a campaign for parity for female theater artists, the festival also started keeping track of its gender makeup. This year, from a pool of playwrights and other creators that was 39 percent female, 48 percent male and 13 percent mixed teams, it chose a lineup of shows whose creators were 41 percent female, 46 percent male and 13 percent mixed.

FringeNYC continues to lure industry big shots downtown, of course, and Ms. Holy said she was glad to have them eyeing the talent. But skipping the line while ordinary theatergoers wait is no longer allowed. The festival relies on thousands of volunteers, and Ms. Holy sounded wary of any threat to its spirit, which she described as “we’re all in this together.”

At the two-week San Francisco Fringe Festival, which opens on Sept. 6 and features 36 productions this year, the reigning ethos springs partly from what Ms. Augello called the risk and “plain old fun” of choosing artists by lottery. Even so, she said, she has encountered plenty of people — potential contributors, journalists, performance space owners — who would value her festival more highly if the productions were handpicked.

“I had a critic say to me once, ‘Well, how am I supposed to know what’s good?’ And I thought, well, isn’t that your job?” Ms. Augello said.

But at FringeNYC, the sheer volume of shows can make it baffling to navigate except by following the buzz. In deciding which ones to see, even the adjudicators depend on word of mouth, said Steven Cherry, who has been a festival juror since 2008.

“We have more information than almost anybody, and yet we have very little,” he said. “So it’s really quite a crapshoot.”

A version of this article appears in print on August 10, 2013, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: In a Theater Mecca, ‘Fringe’ Tends to Mean Choosy. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe